alt Hacker NewsThe 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished
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I love internet archeology! Some time ago I found out that Microsoft had released an official free expansion for Frontpage 98 with a bunch of themes. I managed to find on web.archive.org official Microsoft page with the expansion to download, but the download was done through some form and unfortunately none of the many archived versions archived it correctly. So I've checked if maybe it was archived on some PC magazine cover CD on archive.org, but no luck. Then I've started digging through Google but still nothing, expect some old posts on forums which had attachments to download it, but they were not available anymore and once again, not archived... So I've started searching by the filename contained in the download link - nothing. Finally I've tried DiscMaster [1] to look for the filename and boom, there it was! I love the feeling when you are so many times on the edge of giving up thinking "it's gone forever", but try new things and finally find it, long forgotten but now safely (hopefully) preserved on my computer and backup drives.
For me it was a Bjork song but it was in Icelandic. I had heard it around 2010ish and didn't have the song. Because it was in Icelandic and I didn't know the name of the track I couldn't figure out how to find it - because I had streamed through all of Biorks albums on one of these streaming services and it wasn't on any of them. I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics, but I couldn't even identify a single word from memory that I could use to search for the lyrics.
After more than a decade The Guardian had an article on Bjork and mentioned something about her fan club on Reddit. So I thought I would ask there.
That hit the jackpot, someone mentioned she had an earlier band called Tappi Tíkarrass (from 1981-1983) and it was a song they performed on some TV show. https://youtu.be/nkuXOtFLMZw
My wife and her siblings had a book as kids. They don't know the title. 8 years ago I posted on Reddit in the hope someone could help... We're still none the wiser!
https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9865u4/wha...
For me it was Station Approach by Elbow [0] - the one with the giant slow semibreve vocoder chorus [1]
Not obscure at all, but i sang it to bemused twenty-somethings in a dozen record shops. I had high confidence from the timbre it was Super Furry Animals, so i also combed their catalogue. In the end i bought the album blind (deaf?) on a recommendation and was gobsmacked to find the track on it. Serendipity, baby!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2k5EfLPB3A
[1] all this time, i thought it was a vocoder! I was just listening on crappy speakers, i guess. It's just tight vocal harmony and a production that possibly puts the bass through the vocal reverb
The streaming model really makes remembering details difficult.
I used to play only local files, and then during a time at university played in the office music on Youtube. One specific album got stuck in my head, but for a long while afterwards didn't find it again. No name, no lyrics - not a good starting point. I just remembered a pink unicorn and that is was psychedelic rock and that the singer sang with a specific deep voice. After several rounds of research (the same youtube channel is still up) and looking through uploads of the timeframe and their recommendations it turned out I misremembered: The cover had a rainbow cat looking into the distance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea1mYXUcBY, Whoopie cat).
How I remembered was funny. I talked to someone about this, researched while, then talked again, when something came over me to look to the side into the distance with a slightly open mouth - just to suddenly realize that this face was on the cover, not the unicorn!
But actually, I still have that image of the unicorn cover in my mind (one color silhouette, hoofs into the air, but who knows at this point). The Whoopie cat album is definitely one I heard back than and it was the music I was searching for, but the unicorn cover probably also existed in that space and was a different album. Or did I just imagine something based on space stallions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Otaq2tmNMM)?
After that experience I set up a local music player again and downloaded some of the albums I wanted to remember.
Reminds me of the hunt for "Subways of your mind" - since found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_of_Your_Mind#Online_se...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22636989 2020 (82 comments)
Loved Spotify when it was good.
I found so many bands east Europe, all written in Cyrillic, so I couldn't have searched for them easily.
Before that I used Soulseek for Japanese bands.
I think researching things that have little internet footprint is an underrated use of LLMs. Most recently, I did quite an extensive research on a card game called "king", variants of which are played in Turkey, Portugal, Brazil, Belgium, France, Russia, Italy, Poland (under the name "Kierki"), and several other countries (but seemingly not known in English speaking countries, despite the English name). It allowed me to uncover scoring patterns that tie various versions together and reconstruct its possible origins and development, however speculative.
Mine was back in the kazaa/limewire days, there was a particular track that get repeatedly uploaded under fake names. Except it was just a 10 second loop rather than an entire track so I only had 1 line of lyrics to work from "I am suffocating"
Back in the day it wasn't as easy to search things online, but I eventually found it was Breathless by Lifer
Edit: Also it's quite UK specific, but there was a pop group called Alisha's attic in the 90s that did a live rock version of one their songs. I recorded it off the radio but that cassette got lost somewhere. I couldn't even find a mention of it online
This reminds me of when I rediscovered the track-listing of a CD titled "The Best Album of the Next Century Ever" which came with boxes of Golden/Cinnamon Grahams cereal. Had some real bangers like Josephine by Terrorvision and Come On Spring by Antenna, plus some very early tracks by Space and Muse who both went on to make it pretty big. I listened to it on repeat for months as a young teen. That kind of nostalgia probably isn't available to the generations below.
Quite reminiscent of Searching for Sugar Man! (true story and excellent movie in case you haven't seen it yet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man
> I searched for the song on Pandora. We hadn’t checked it before because it’s no longer a major music service
I find that take interesting. I use Pandora to this day as my primary streaming source, as it has my vibes down perfectly, and no other services has that many years of training into what I like to listen to. But even more important, it is almost always the music source I see when I'm restaurants. I prefer small mom-and-pop type places, so maybe I'm only seeing a niche.
I'm not trying to argue it is a leading platform, as it clearly is not. But it is fascinating that people searching for music don't check what was a leading platform 10 years ago. Especially when the music in question is older than that. And the search started when it was a leading platform.
Actually that last point really confuses me - why would today's platform popularity have limited the search 15 years ago? That part of the story makes little sense. If this search began back when Pandora was at its peak, why wouldn't they have started from there long ago?
Super interesting! Good you find it. Sounds like math rock/post rock somehow, or at least adjacent to that.
Ok HN, a challenge.
I have given this challenge to many, and I'm either completely mistaken, or the world has forgotten something.
In 1984, as many of you may know, Giorgio Moroder released his version of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis". This is a moderately good version of the movie, but would be superseded by newer versions with more recovered scenes etc.
Moroder's soundtrack, however, was brilliant. He brought in many of the stars of the time to do songs (Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant etc) and they were good songs. He also wrote a lot of original incidental music for this version.
2 versions of the soundtrack were released. One has the pop artist's tracks and a couple of Giorgio's originals, and the other has the complete soundtrack (all of the pop artist's tracks and all of Giorgio's music).
Both were released in multiple countries.
Both were released on CD
The first, shorter version was released on Vinyl.
Apparently the second, longer version was never released on Vinyl.
Except... After seeing the movie in 1984, my mum ordered the soundtrack (specifically the longer version) at HMV in Parramatta in Sydney (Australia). It took a few weeks to arrive, and I happended to be there when we picked it up (at the age of 7 or 8). I remember it vividly, because it was a multi-disk release, and it had a gorgeous fold out sleeve. The only problem was that mum had ordered the CD version, and they had ordered the vinyl version. They subsequently re-ordered it, we picked up the CD a few weeks later, and I still own that CD.
Problem is, I want the Vinyl version. I've asked the internet, I've asked record stores in multiple countries, I sent an email to Giorgio Moroder's nephew(?) (no reply) and it doesn't seem to exist.
I'd put this down to imagination except for the fact that Australia (and Japan, and probably elsewhere) has a track-record of receiving weird / customised versions of records, and some of them seem to have disappeared from the official databases.
So, if anyone out there feels like doing some sleuthing, that's the challenge. Find the Vinyl version of this[0], or prove it doesn't exist. (I know, proving non-existence is impossible, but it's worth a try!)
Either way, it's a great soundtrack, and worth a listen!
[0]: https://archive.org/details/Giorgio-moroder-metropolis-score
I've had a few of these musical splinters, and most of them have worked their way out with time. One was quite recent: the music video for Underwater Love by Smoke City, which was memorable for their bullet-time-ish effect that pre-dated The Matrix by a year or few.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M (uploaded 12 years ago, but I couldn't find it for a long time and only looked again recently - whilst looking for Faith no More's song of the same name).
Another was the song Purple, for which the commonly shared MP3 was mislabelled as by the band Air. Turns out it was a band called Crustation, who released a single magnificent trip-hop album, with Irish vocalist Bronagh Slevin, and then disappeared into the ether. Took me a few sessions over a few years to track all that down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNJCVruRLc
Another one was a song that got high rotation for a very brief period of time (when I was on a driving holiday, and so had the radio on a lot) maybe on Triple J, early 2000s, called Media Junkies by the band of the same name. Turns out the song was actually called News Addiction. One hit wonder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZxYopvowA
The last remaining splinter (that I can recall) is a song from the mid-90s, "eager beaver" or "tenfour" or some variation on that features heavily in the lyrics as truckers chatting over CB radios. Haven't done a search session in a number of years on that one, but never got anything close to a lead on previous attempts. Maybe it's time to have another go.
Way back then, it was the research that was at least part of the enjoyment. I think it taught me how to research, to some degree at least. I went from Faith No More to Mr Bungle, and back then it wasn't easy to find this kind of stuff. Mr Bungle then changed my entire future musical taste journey. Good times. Worth the effort.
For me it was: A Lesson in Crime (Album) - Tokyo Police Club. Specifically the song ‘Cheer it On’.
(For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!).
And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny.
—————— Comment from the other thread: > The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.
I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.
AI to the rescue.
I was just revisiting my own Holy Grail, though much less rare. From the Napster days: My Gay Uncle's version of "Back That Azz Up": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDj2JpJr3vU
This is the same version I downloaded randomly from Napster when I would search vaguely for "punk covers". It's just so great, but with potato recording quality (maybe naturally) and a bunch of skips and clicks that sound like a shitty CD rip or early MP3 encoding artifacts. I'd love to find an actually clean version of the song, but to no avail. It may not exist.
“return to innocence” by enigma
mesmerized by it growing up, could only recall the native american-sounding chanting. googled “hey yah heyyyyyyy” and found the answer on reddit. turns out it samples/infringes an indigenous taiwanese (amis) chant.
Another thread like that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319995
Gah this can be so annoying. I've got one going for 56 years. A cassette tape that I had as a kid, all I remember is that it was orange and that it had the most amazing jazzy tracks on it (mostly instrumental). I've listened to every orange labelled tape on various tape archives and still haven't found it, the memory has faded far enough that I only occasionally remember snatches of it. But I'll keep looking.
Other ones: Tony Banks, Portrait of Jerry Jackson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_U0jhtzmzI
Cori Josias, Takin' it straight
Oh wow, "OK Tokyo"'s predecessor.
I think I bought the "A Lesson In Crime" EP a long time ago, because a song from it got me hooked during a Michel Gondry movie?
Never bothered to look for their roots. Cool pointer! Thanks.
Thanks for posting your search. I absolutely love stories like this. I can’t help but think that music was a little more interesting when it was primarily physically released.
I think the name of the band is a bit ironic.
I had a similar thing. A while back, I watched the first episode of Second Chance; a rather forgettable show, that I decided not to continue, but it did have a great song, in the early part of the episode: No Evil, by a Canadian singer; Serena Ryder.
Good luck finding it. If you do, let me know.
Great story - thanks for posting it here!
Never underestimate naming your next project something googlable
Author here. I bought this CD in 2011 and spent 15 years failing to find out who made it. The band charted at #47 on the UK Independent Singles Chart in June 2006, so it was a real, professionally made, commercially distributed record, and I couldn't find anything online: no credits, no fingerprint match, no company registration for the label, nothing on streaming.
Part of the answer turned out to be that their website was Flash, so it was never meaningfully indexed, and their MySpace was never mirrored. A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick.
It was eventually solved by searching on the producer's credits rather than the band's name, and then by two people replying to cold emails. Both the producer and the singer were generous enough to be interviewed, so there's some fresh detail in there about the recording session as well.
>If anyone knows anything about this band, who they were, where they were based and if they have any other songs, please let me know.
try searching for "bad imitation of U2"
>where they were based
they're not based
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO5C4gLcZiU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpNXQXbQj8I
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+Still+Haven%2...
It didn’t take me 15 years, but I had a similar experience with the Norwegian band Kaizers Orchestra. I first heard one of their songs used in a Flash animation (Bak et Hallelujah) in 2003 and I just loved it, but I had no idea who it was nor did I understand Norwegian.
I listened over and over trying to hear the lyrics and transcribe what I was hearing as best I could until I got something close enough to correct that I could search for it. The song was from their first album and came out in 2001 so finally I got lucky a few months later and found a Norwegian site that had the lyrics.
I’ve listened to every album of theirs since and they’re still one of my favorite bands. I even got to see them live when they toured the US last year. It wasn’t a huge audience but me and few of the other obvious diehard fans in the audience were glad they came over here.